Gary Reber Robert Reich continues to be confused and restricted in his labor-only focused thinking with respect to addressing economic inequality. While it is true that customers with money who purchase products and services cause businesses to expand and invest, without customers with money there can be no demand for investment in companies who can grow the economy. The problem is that modern technology is so efficient, and getting more efficient constantly, and as a consequence is removing jobs from the economy at an exponential rate. In Reichs world, the reality that JOBS are the ONLY way to earn an income is why he advocates for coerced minimum wage legislation. His other notion is that workers are entitled to higher wages because workers are far more productive now. What Reich fails to understand is that workers are not more productive now than they have ever been as human productiveness largely has unchanged (our human abilities are limited by physical strength and brain power––and relatively constant). Reich fails to grasp the significant of understanding that fundamentally, economic value is created through human and non-human contributions and the fact that most changes in the productive capacity of the world since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution can be attributed to technological improvements in our capital assets, and a relatively diminishing proportion to human labor. As a result, increasingly productive technological advancement makes many forms of labor unnecessary. Because of this undeniable fact, free-market forces no longer establish the value of labor. Instead, the price of labor is artificially elevated by government through minimum wage legislation, overtime laws, and collective bargaining legislation or by government employment and government subsidization of private employment solely to increase consumer income. This is in essence what Reich advocates. Reich only sees advancing the prosperity of the economy through coerced trickle-down; in other words, through redistribution achieved by the rigging of labor prices, by taxation to support redistribution and job “creation,” or subsidization by inflation and by all kinds of welfare, open and concealed. Reich continues to be obvious (or controlled politically and financially) to institutionalized greed (creating concentrated capital ownership, monopolies, and special privileges) and the ability of greedy rich people to manipulate the lives of people who struggle with declining labor worker earnings and job opportunities, and then accumulate the bulk of the money through monopolized productive capital ownership. Our scientists, engineers, and executive managers who are not owners themselves, except for those in the highest employed positions, are encouraged to work to destroy employment by making the capital owner more productive. How much employment can be destroyed by substituting machines for people is a measure of their success––always focused on producing at the lowest cost. Only the people who already own productive capital are the beneficiaries of their work, as they systematically concentrate more and more capital ownership in their stationary 1 percent ranks. Yet the 1 percent are not the people who do the overwhelming consuming. The result is the consumer populous is not able to get the money to buy the products and services produced as a result of substituting machines for people. And yet you can’t have mass production without mass human consumption. It is the exponential disassociation of production and consumption that is the problem in the United States economy, and the reason that ordinary citizens must gain access to productive capital ownership to improve their economic well-being. So why doesnt Robert Reich see this? Why does he not see that when consumer earning power is systematically acquired in the course of the normal operations of the economy by people who need and want more consumer products and services, the production of products and services should rise to unprecedented levels as well as the quality and craftsmanship of such, freed of the cornercutting imposed by the chronic shortage of consumer purchasing power? Reich should realize that without this necessary balance hopeless poverty, social alienation, and economic breakdown will persist, even though the American economy is ripe with the physical, technical, managerial, and engineering prerequisites for improving the lives of the 99 percent majority. Why? Because there is a crippling organizational malfunction that prevents making full use of the technological prowess that we have developed. The system does not fully facilitate connecting the majority of citizens, who have unsatisfied needs and wants, to the productive capital assets enabling productive efficiency and economic growth. Reich should realize that the solution is broadening personal ownership of wealth-creating, income-producting capital assets (the source of wealth and income that empowers America’s wealthy to become more richer than they’ve ever been. If a man or woman owns something that will produce a second income other than a job, he’ll or shell be a better customer for the things that American industry produces. But the problem is how to get the working man and woman that second income. The question that requires an answer by Robert Reich is now timely before us. It was first posed by binary economist Louis Kelso in the 1950s but has never been thoroughly discussed on the national stage. Nor has there been the proper education of our citizenry that addresses what economic justice is and what ownership is. Therefore, by ignoring such issues of economic justice and ownership, our leaders are ignoring the concentration of power through ownership of productive capital, with the result of denying the 99 percenters equal opportunity to become capital owners. The question, as posed by Kelso is: “how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (capital owners) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total goods and services,” and thus, “how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor—physical capital—is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority—and ultimately 100 percent—of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?” The answers can be found in the open platform of the Unite America Party, published by The Huffington Post at huffingtonpost/.../platform-of-the-unite... as well as Nation Of Change at nationofchange.org/platform-unite-america... and OpEd News at opednews/.../Platform-of-the-Unite-Amer-by.... Platform of the Unite America Party The growing imbalance between how wealth is produced and how it is earned and distributed cannot be corrected without... 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Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 03:00:18 +0000
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